DuckDuckGo: A New Search Engine Built from Open Source

DuckDuckGo is a new search engine focused on relevant results and respecting user privacy. Actually a mash-up of several other sites like Wikipedia, About, Bing, and Yahoo, DuckDuckGo also uses it's own web crawler, the DuckDuckBot. DuckDuckGo uses what it calls Zero-click search results to try to guess what you are looking for and give it to you directly in your search results. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few weeks now, and I'm impressed. What further impresses me is that the entire site is built on open source tools, ranging from FreeBSD for the operating system to good old-fashioned Perl for the logic.

According to DuckDuckGo's developer, Gabriel Weinberg, the stack looks like this:

Operating System: FreeBSD for the main site or Ubuntu for Amazon EC2 failover imagesIt's like the evolution of the LAMP stack that has served so many sites so well for many years. Too bad there isn't a snappy acronym like LAMP for it. Maybe we can call it the Duck stack.